The Heart

Of all the things a man is charged to keep, the wise father in the proverb names one above the rest. Keep thy heart, he says, with all diligence, more than any other keeping, above every other guard you set, for out of it are the issues of life. The heart is the fountain, and everything a life becomes flows out from it. Guard many things and neglect the heart, and you have set sentries at the windows while the door stands open. The one keeping that governs all the others is the keeping of the heart.

The word for keep is a soldier’s word. It means to guard, to watch over, to garrison, as a company of soldiers guards a fortress against assault. And with all diligence means above all guardings, with a vigilance greater than we give to anything else. For the heart, in the Scripture’s sense, is not merely the seat of feeling but the deep center of the whole person, the spring of thought and will and love from which the streams of the whole life run. Guard the spring, and the streams run clean. Leave the spring unguarded, and no downstream labor will keep the waters pure.

THE FOUNTAIN, NOT THE STREAMS

Here is where we so often go wrong. We spend our strength correcting the streams, the outward acts and words, while leaving the fountain untouched. We labor to control the temper, to guard the tongue, to amend the behavior, and we wonder that the same faults keep welling up, not seeing that they well up from a source we have never addressed. Out of the heart, the Lord said, proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, and all the rest. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. The stream is bitter because the spring is bitter, and there is no amending of the stream that will sweeten the fountain.

This is why so much moral effort fails and exhausts us. We are forever downstream, dredging and damming and trying to clear the water, while the poison flows in fresh from a source we will not go up to. The Lord went always to the fountain. He was less concerned with the outward deed than with the heart that produced it, less troubled by the murder than by the hatred, less by the adultery than by the lustful look, because he knew that the deed is only the stream and the heart is the spring, and that to change a life you must go up to the source.

A HEART WE CANNOT KEEP ALONE

But here we meet a hard truth, that the heart we are commanded to keep is the very thing least able to be kept by our own strength. The heart is deceitful above all things, the prophet says, and desperately wicked; who can know it? We cannot even fully see our own hearts, let alone cleanse them. The command to keep the heart, taken alone, would crush us, for it asks us to guard a fortress whose own walls are treacherous. And so the command drives us to the promise, for what we cannot do God has undertaken to do. A new heart also will I give you, he says, and a new spirit will I put within you; I will take away the stony heart, and give you a heart of flesh.

So the keeping of the heart is both God’s gift and our diligence, and we must not sever them. He gives the new heart; we guard it. He does the cleansing we could never do, creating in us a clean heart and renewing a right spirit within us, and then he sets us to keep with all diligence the heart he has renewed. We do not manufacture a clean heart by our watching, but neither may we neglect the watching of the heart he has cleansed. The prayer and the vigilance go together. Create in me a clean heart, O God, we pray, and then, having received it, we keep it with all diligence.

GUARDING THE GATES

Much of keeping the heart is keeping its gates, for the heart is fed through the senses, and what we let in through the eyes and the ears and the company we keep becomes, in time, the furniture of the heart. We cannot guard the fountain while leaving the channels that feed it wide open to every pollution. The images we gaze on, the words we take in, the thoughts we let loiter, all sink down into the heart and shape what flows out of it. To keep the heart is to keep watch at its gates, to be careful what we behold and hear and dwell upon, knowing that whatever we admit through the senses will one day flow out through the life.

But the heart is not kept by guarding alone, by the mere shutting out of evil, for a heart merely emptied does not stay empty. It must also be filled. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, the apostle says, and the psalmist, thy word have I hid in mine heart. The best guard against what would fill the heart with poison is to fill it first with good, to furnish the inner rooms with the word and with prayer and with the remembrance of God, so that there is no empty space for the enemy to occupy. The garrisoned heart is also the furnished heart, and the peace of God that passeth understanding is set to keep it, garrisoning the heart it fills.

THE HEART GOD SEARCHES

There is a keeping of the heart that we cannot do because we cannot even see the heart we are meant to keep. It is deceitful above all things, the prophet says, and then adds, who can know it? And the answer comes in the next breath. I the LORD search the heart, God says, I try the reins. God sees the heart to its depths, the chambers hidden even from ourselves, the motives coiled beneath our motives, the sin we have talked ourselves into not seeing. What we cannot keep because we cannot see, he can, for he searches it wholly, and knows it better than we know it ourselves.

This is why the keeping of the heart must include the inviting of God to search it. The psalmist, who knew he could not trust his own sight of himself, prayed the boldest of prayers. Search me, O God, he said, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. He did not trust his own examination, which is always partial and always kind to itself, but asked the God who searches the heart to show him what was there, even the wicked way he could not see, and to lead him out of it. This is the humility without which no heart is truly kept, the willingness to be searched by One who sees what we hide from ourselves.

For our own examination of our hearts is forever compromised, gentle with our favorite sins, blind to the faults we most need to see, quick to excuse what it ought to condemn. We cannot be trusted to search ourselves. But God can be trusted to search us, and the soul that would keep its heart must open it to that searching, must pray to be shown the wicked way it cannot find on its own, and must not flinch when the light reaches into the rooms it would rather have kept dark. To be searched by God is uncomfortable, but it is the only honest keeping of a heart too deceitful to keep itself.

And this searching, once invited, is not a terror but a mercy, for the God who searches the heart searches it to heal. He does not expose our hidden sin to shame us but to cleanse us, laying it open as a surgeon lays open the wound, that it may be dealt with and not left to fester in the dark. The soul that has learned to pray, search me, O God, has put the keeping of its heart into the only hands that can truly keep it, and walks in a safety the self-examined never know, the safety of being fully seen by One who means it only good.

So attend to your heart above every outward thing. Do not spend all your labor downstream, correcting acts and words while the fountain runs unwatched, but go up to the source. Ask God for the new and clean heart that you cannot make, and then keep with all diligence the heart he gives. Guard its gates, watching what you let in through the eyes and ears, and fill its rooms with the word, that there be no empty space for evil. For out of the heart are the issues of life, and as the heart is, so, in time, the whole life will be. Keep thy heart with all diligence.